Adam West’s Batman from the 1960s television series is well known for being on the lighter side of Bat fare. West has reprised the role many times since the series, but one rendition that hasn’t gotten much attention before was him reading from the decidedly dark Frank Miller comic run, The Dark Knight Returns.
Yesterday, Abraham Riesman—the author of True Believer, the biography on Marvel creator Stan Lee—shared the clip on Twitter, cut from the 2013 documentary series Superheroes.
“I am once again thinking about how an obscure PBS documentary got Adam West (RIP) to read 20 seconds’ worth of narration from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and how those 20 seconds are my favorite Batman movie,” Riesman tweeted.
Based on the response, it seems that the internet agrees with him. West’s rendition of this gritty version of the Bat will send chills down your spine. “Do you know who I am, punk? I’m the worst nightmare you’ve ever had, the kind that made you wake up screaming for your mother,” West narrates in the clip above. “You’ve got a mother, don’t you? Every punk should have a mother.”
Wow! I always knew West was talented but his rendition here is truly terrifying. So terrifying, in fact, that it might keep me awake at night, afraid that West will enter my dreams and become my worst nightmare.
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As the co-writer of the 3-hour PBS documentary “Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle,” I find Riesman’s comment as objectionable as much of his writing. A three-hour prime time network documentary is hardly “obscure” (still available on Amazon Prime, thank you very much) and the selection of West (who was also interviewed) wasn’t cut, it was very much part of the third episode. But facts never trouble Riesman very much.
#1: To be fair, the word “cut” here comes not from Mr. Riesman’s tweet, but rather from the present article – and I suspect that the present writer meant the word as shorthand for “excerpted from” rather than in its professional sense (i.e. “deleted from”, as in a deleted scene). That said, I’d grant that it’s easier than it should be to interpret the article’s phrase as you did.
As to “obscure”, which is Mr. Riesman’s word…I’m inclined to grant some wiggle room on that one. With some signifcant exceptions – and those leaning very sharply toward (a) British and (b) “literary” – PBS is not generally known for serious coverage of the more popular side of popular culture. (They’re getting better about this, albeit slowly.) My own sense is that nine years after initial release, any documentary miniseries originally released on PBS – the exception in this case being anything with Ken Burns’ name on it – will have largely fallen off popular radar. In particular, I don’t recall this as being one of the features that pops up at least semi-regularly during local PBS pledge drives, and I don’t immediately recall it being available via PBS’s own streaming archive, to which I subscribe by way of my local affiliate.
I’m not going to lie, having an animated adaptation of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS where The Batman is voiced by the late, great Adam West would have been deeply unsettling in a way that suits the story perfectly; on the other hand it would be terribly, terribly sad to imagine the Caped Crusader coming to so unhappy an end.
Hee! It just struck me that casting Mr Peter Weller as Commissioner Gordon would have been cheeky, but might well have worked nonetheless.
After sharing with several fans of Adam (in their 40s and 50s), I’d say their pained and grimaced reactions were far more “terrifying” and “nightmarish”, than anything heard.
Think I’ll watch another Bright Knight episode on blu-ray, and store this little 20seconds away in the back of my Batcave files.